Germany No Longer Lives in a Safe Hinterland

Germany responded firmly to Russia’s alleged attempt to attack Leipzig airport, but the next incident may demand more. The federal government quickly identified Russia as responsible for the event in early August, closed the Russian Consulate General in Bonn and ordered the Russian House on Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse to shut. It also plans to increase pressure on Russia’s shadow fleet.

The response is decisive without, in the article’s view, going too far. The government itself describes Leipzig as evidence of a new level of aggression. Berlin expects further hybrid attacks and believes Moscow could increase their intensity.

Germany has so far handled Russian hybrid warfare as a collection of separate security problems. Intelligence services deal with espionage, police and federal prosecutors investigate sabotage and arson, and specialist agencies address cyberattacks. That administrative division breaks a broader Russian strategy into isolated cases.

The National Security Council in the Chancellery now provides a place to bring those threats together. The Leipzig case shows why that coordination is needed. Russia combines professionally configured technology, so-called low-level agents assigned individual tasks on the ground, intelligence gathered by its services and similar operations elsewhere in Europe. Together, they form a pattern that individual cases of espionage, sabotage or crime can conceal.

Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt described the situation this way: "We are not at war, but we are the daily target of hybrid warfare." Moscow has kept its operations below the point where hybrid aggression becomes open military confrontation. Germany, however, cannot avoid every risk of a Russian reaction if it wants to deter Putin.

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We are not at war, but we are the daily target of hybrid warfare.